“The governor threatens to furlough people, but there are still no matching orders from OPM,” Speaker Arnold I. Palacios said in an interview on Friday. “We want any dislocated employees to have options in the private sector, and we want to see them trained for available jobs.”
Palacios, R-Saipan, said WIA has “good programs, but they say they’re understaffed.”
Rep. Tina Sablan, Ind.-Saipan, said lawmakers wanted to know “what services are presently available and how the CNMI government could supplement those services and programs for people that are likely to be displaced as a result of downsizing in government.”
She added, “There have talks from the administration about furloughs so we need to be prepared.”
“It was a great meeting,” she said. “What is clear to me now is that there is no need to duplicate services that are already available through WIA. They have funding — they have programs and referral services that are available for people who are dislocated or unemployed. They subsidize salaries, they subsidize training, they pay tuition, so it’s a really great program.”
But the Legislature should make sure that WIA is properly staffed, Sablan said.
The meeting also discussed the need for a government desk audit.
“OPM is the obvious agency [to conduct this audit], but they don’t have an adequate auditing section, and they’ve lost a lot of staff and those people were never replaced,” Sablan said.
She described OPM and WIA as “very critical agencies.”
“They should be objective and impartial in conducting their duties, but they’re both under the office of the governor, so that’s another thing that we could change by legislation.”
Sablan noted that OPM used to be under the Civil Service Commission.
“Then it went to the governor’s office — I think its services have been affected. But there’s already a pending bill [to restore OPM’s autonomy] and the governor says he supports it so it’s just a matter of us acting on it,” she said.
WIA used to be autonomous, too, she added. “And they should have a state board — that’s another thing that came to our attention.”
Sen. Maria T. Pangelinan, D-Saipan and chairwoman of the Senate Fiscal Affairs Committee said the meeting was “about looking ahead and planning ahead.”
She noticed, however, that “although the government continues to hire people, every time we ask questions from agencies, they say they can’t provide answers or cannot do their job because they lack staff. Where are all the employees hired? When agencies come here they tell us they’re overloaded — ‘we can’t do this’ or ‘this is the best we can do’ and yet we continue to hire people or replace them.”
Moreover, departments, agencies and other government offices “always give good reports, but the same problems persist,” Pangelinan said.
“We always think we’re arriving at a solution to a problem when we haven’t really identified the real problem yet. That’s what I’ve seen in this government — when we have a meeting we think we have solved it but later we realize we’re stuck with all these problems that have eventually caught up with us.”
Vice Speaker Joseph P. Deleon Guerrero, R-Saipan, was the other lawmaker who attended the meeting.
